


Reconcilable Differences

by gin_eater



Series: Deep Sea Divers [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Light Bondage, Seriously it's like the wonderbread of bondage, Tentacle Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 20:13:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3991258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After crossing the Storybrooke town line, Ursula is reunited with her estranged half -- as is Cruella.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reconcilable Differences

**Author's Note:**

> I think we've only ever seen two of them in use at once, but I figured four accessible tentacles for Ursula in human form, going off of her "eight hands" line and the fact that her animated self had only six.

Ursula's heart raced as they crossed the Storybrooke town line. Rumpelstiltskin had said there was magic here, and she'd hoped -- after thirty years, she'd almost been afraid to, but she'd _hoped_ ...

She heard Cruella fawn her thanks to the Evil Queen, but their voices were distant, the scenery a blur as Cruella drove on, sight and sound slurring, muting in favor of _feeling_ \-- like the urchin spines tingling that accompanied the return of blood to a sleeping limb.

They were back. _They were back._

"Darling, are you all right?" Cruella asked, concern lacing her tone. "Why are you breathing like that?"

"Pull over," Ursula gasped.

"It's a bit late for carsickness to be setting in, isn't it?"

"Just _pull over!_ "

Cruella did, tires screeching on the asphalt before the car trundled to an abrupt stop in the grass on the side of the road.

Ursula unbuckled her seatbelt with trembling hands and all but leapt free of the car, not bothering to close the door behind her, and headed for the woods. She heard Cruella calling after her, but didn't stop until she reached a clearing in the trees.

Accustomed as she had become to a jointed existence, she almost expected them to be stiff from disuse, but they unfurled from her body with the same fluid articulation they had always possessed, winding off scroll-like in four directions above the dead-leaved forest floor. Ursula closed her eyes, quick breaths smoothing into deep inhalations of the crisp New England air, cold in her nose and lungs and sharp on her bare appendages. She resisted the urge to bury them in the detritus and duff just to gorge herself on sensation -- lessons the Enchanted Forest had taught her about plants best given wide berth still made Cruella laugh whenever she was reminded of them -- but she could _stretch,_ and sway, and taste the salt of the nearby harbor on the wind, although strangely, her first instinct was not to run for it.

Her first instinct lay with the footsteps running in her direction, crunching through the groundcover with a lifetime's worth of study put toward the mastery of spike heels.

Ursula opened her eyes and turned her face to Cruella, who slowed and stopped short at the edge of the clearing, taking in the scene with a look of astonishment that seemed to waver between happiness and dismay before it was overtaken by a genuinely warm smile.

"All on again, are you?" she asked, the question steaming in the air.

Ursula laughed with real, unmitigated joy for the first time in years, and it was almost musical in its sound.

"Nearly," she said. "Just one or two more things still missing."

"Two arms, two legs, four tentacles -- you seem fairly accounted for, darling."

Ursula shook her head, and in the next instant pushed out a hip. Whiplike, one tentacle hooked around Cruella's waist and tugged her forward. She staggered into the sea witch with a startled grunt, but barely had time to smile in happy surprise before Ursula's fingers threaded through her hair and her mouth closed over Cruella's own.

God, it was amazing to hold this woman in more than just her arms again. Almost of their own accord, Ursula's tentacles coiled greedily around Cruella's legs and torso, relishing the contrasting textures of slick fabric, coarse fur, and soft, pampered skin. Even the kiss itself felt more intense, as though she could feel every notch and crevice in Cruella's teeth, every palatal ridge and individual tastebud that swept over her own.

"Mm-- Er, darling?" Cruella mumbled somewhat tightly against Ursula's lips.

"Mhm ..."

"I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I do still need to breathe."

"Oh." The tentacles loosened their hold. "Sorry, I just ..." Her mouth moved to Cruella's throat, and her hands and other extremities roamed greedily beneath the other woman's coat, seemingly intent on touching her everywhere at once, shoulder blades and slender waist, hips and breasts and thighs and backside and everywhere in between. "You can't imagine how good this feels ..."

She felt Cruella shudder and halfway sink against her, knees a thing of the past, gloved hands gripping the yoke of Ursula's jacket like a life buoy.

"Oh, darling, I beg to differ," Cruella breathed, and moaned into Ursula's mouth when she kissed her again, her whole body spasming as one tentacle snaked its way beneath her dress and between her legs, suction cups bumping across the quickly dampening satin of her panties. "Oh, fuck me ..."

Ursula wasn't sure if that was an expletive, a command, or a combination thereof, but she shook her head.

"Not here," she said.

"Why the hell not?!" Cruella snapped, with an almost laughable amount of impatient venom. "We've done it in the woods before."

"Because it's freezing--"

"Again, I beg to differ."

"--it's going to rain soon, and we abandoned your car by the side of the road, with the Evil Queen and the goddamned Charmings probably no more than a few minutes behind us, no matter how fast you drive. You don't think they'll find that interesting enough to investigate?"

Cruella groaned. " _Bloody_  heroes! We've been here five minutes and already they've managed to thwart a perfectly innocent tryst!"

Ursula quirked an eyebrow. "Innocent?"

"Well, we're not hurting anybody, are we? Of all the things we came here to do, I highly doubt 'orgasm' rates very far up the list."

Ursula stroked a tentacle down Cruella's back, smiling at the shiver the motion elicited.

"Come on. Let's head into town, find a place to stay, and then I promise you," she said with intent, thumbing away the lipstick smudged at the edges of Cruella's kiss-swollen mouth, " _everything_ will go according to plan ..."

* * *

  
" _Bloody_ heroes," Cruella muttered under her breath as she clinched her jaw and restlessly shifted her weight in the lounge of Granny's Bed  & Breakfast. On a nearby loveseat, Ursula sat, legs crossed and arms folded, trying to ignore the shabby chic furnishings and kitschy bird knickknacks that seemed to dot every available surface.

Granny herself cut them a suspicious look across the hall, phone receiver cradled between shoulder and cheek as she negotiated with Regina about what she could expect in exchange for deigning to house two-thirds of the Queens of Darkness in Storybrooke's sorrily singular excuse for a temporary living establishment. What were they supposed to do, seek redemption from Cruella's car? The Panther did have a surprisingly roomy backseat, but Ursula had rather been hoping for a bit more space to, ahem, stretch out in.

At last, Granny hung up the phone with a sour look and retrieved a swan-handled key from a drawer. She brought it to the lounge and held it out at arm's length, loath to get too close to either of them, as though villainy might be contagious.

She was going to _love_ laundering their sheets come morning.

"Number 2. Up the stairs and to the left."

Cruella snatched the key out of the old woman's hand and forced her mouth into an appreciative simper.

"Ta ever so, darling," she drawled.

The room predictably followed the hideously homey theme of the rest of the house, but it was clean, had its own bathroom, and the bed was, appropriately, queen-size. It would do.

Cruella chucked the key on the small writing desk that stood against one wall, shucked her coat and haphazardly folded it across the back of the accompanying chair.

Ursula locked the door.

Her tentacles reached Cruella first, crisscrossing her back, the smaller cups near their tips sticking to the bare skin of her upper arms, and Ursula herself was a mere two steps behind them.  
Their mouths met with an avaricious urgency, as if it had been thirty years since they'd kissed at all. Ursula felt her head grow light, and she wondered absently if the amount of blood in her body hadn't yet caught up to the number of places it could rush again, despite her thundering heart's assurances to the contrary.

Her jacket and scarf hit the floor. In motions as quick as they were complementary, one tentacle undid the zip on Cruella's dress just as manicured fingertips raked eagerly up her thighs on their way to grasp the hem of her own, bodies parting just long enough for purple fabric to be peeled away and black to puddle on the floor.

The crush of skin and lace -- and, briefly, pony hair, as Ursula fumbled the phone out of Cruella's bra with one tentacle and blindly tossed it in the direction of the table -- became the textures of choice, and Ursula felt the world rush up around her as one of Cruella's fine-boned hands skidded down her belly and twisted round to smooth three fingers along the front of her panties. She hummed in pleasure into Cruella's mouth, suction cups and fingers tensing and tasting expanses of warm skin that, under its bouquet of lotions and perfumes, still possessed the same sueded undercurrent of decades before -- as if within, Cruella herself might be fur-lined.

It was one of things Ursula had always found so intriguing about the other witch, this strange characteristic of her being in some way inside-out as a person, as if everything had been fitted the wrong way round. Despite her schismatic hair, the constant oppositional forces at work in her head seemed to be a thing extremely few people perceived, and knowledge of them was partly what enabled Ursula to patiently weather the lightning-quick way her mood and mind could change. After all, Ursula had grown up with a mind to shelter the less fortunate from storms; that in her villainy she would seek to shelter a storm itself was perhaps a terrible, but not terribly incongruous, progression.

It helped, of course, that said storm had an eye of intense focus in the midst of its more tempestuous emotions. Cruella watched Ursula's face with eyes half-lidded but rapt as she manipulated her fingers, taking pleasant note of the hitches in Ursula's breathing, deriving an almost giddy delight from the way her tentacles curled in tandem as they ribboned down Cruella's body like tactile filigree. Fantastic to again see the way they flared from Ursula's hips, brown skin shading into the same deep aubergine as her undergarments, their ventral sides pale as English lavender, foreshadowing the bruises Cruella knew they would leave behind on her own skin before the night was over; fantastic, always, to watch the desire play over Ursula's beautiful features, intensifying in the crease between her brows, in the parting of full lips Cruella scarcely managed to leave off long enough to make her way down Ursula's throat, down to bite gently at the tops of her glorious breasts while she reached around and made quick work of the scalloped lace bra that contained them.

Ursula sighed as Cruella took one dark nipple into her mouth, swirling her tongue and dragging her teeth lightly against its stiffening peak. Her hands skimmed down to the small of the sea witch's back and over the voluptuous curve of her ass, grasping and kneading before continuing on to the top two tentacles on either side of Ursula's hips.

"Mm, I've missed this texture," she purred, running her hands along the palliate, pliable tops, smiling when she curled her fingers underneath and the suckers clung greedily to her fingertips. "And it appears they've missed me, too ..."

She took note of but stowed the dark impulse to test the return of her own magic. There would be time enough for that; she could take many things from many people, but not this, not tonight -- not from _her._

And besides, Cruella herself had waited thirty years for Ursula to once again be this involved in their dalliances -- overwhelmingly involved, from the look and sound and feel of her, swaying as if affected by an invisible current, glassy-eyed, breaths even but heavy. She seemed to have forgotten the existence of her hands where they rested, quivering but stationary, upon Cruella's hips, but those wonderful appendages of hers more than made up the lack, simultaneously divesting the both of them of their shoes and remaining underthings as the two witches weaved their way toward the bed.

They crawled sidelong up the mattress, twisting along the way until Ursula's back made contact with the headboard and Cruella sat astride her, their hips rolling in tandem, pushing slick heat against slick heat, until Ursula thought she would go out of her head with frustration, the tempest of sensory overload as bedeviling as it was heavenly.

"Make me come," she murmured, pulling Cruella's pelvis down harder against her own. "God, Cru, just make me come ..."

Cruella grinned, eager for the opportunity.

"As Her Majesty wishes."

She flicked her tongue between the parted seam of Ursula's lips and kissed her once, hard, before skinning down her body to kneel between her legs. She nibbled at Ursula's inner thighs as she spread them wider, and grazed the pad of her thumb over Ursula's entrance, languidly spreading her juices up over her clit.

"God, you're so wet, darling ..."

How she loved to linger here and draw Ursula's agony out as she might a skittish animal, tracing with fingers and mouth whatever patterns came to mind -- diamonds and seashells, houndstooth and herringbone and words more eloquently printed on the body than spoken face to face ...

" _Cruella,_ " Ursula prompted impatiently.

Cruella's face feigned innocence, but she leaned down to follow her thumb's path with her tongue, savoring both the salty tang of her lover's flavor and the half-breathed moan the maneuver evoked. She rested a hand low on Ursula's belly and pressed tiny circles with her thumb just above her clit, and licked slowly twice, big and soft, along her entrance before caressing her from from slit to hood, up and down without interruption, dipping the tip of her tongue inside at the tail end of every stroke.

" _Oh,_ " Ursula sighed, rocking into the sensations. "Yes ... oh, fuck, yes ..."

She was gasping within moments, every exhalation a cry that sounded almost startled by the intensity of her own rapidly upswelling pleasure, and arched up when Cruella's free hand rose to cup one of Ursula's ample breasts, tweaking the nipple between thumb and forefinger in time with the rhythm of her mouth down below.

"Don't stop, don't stop don't stop please oh fuck _god yes_ \--"

She reached up with her right hand to grasp the top of the headboard, panting hard, the fingers of her left knotting with Cruella's against her breast as her toes curled and the two tentacles not gripping the bedknobs spooled in on themselves, all of her coiling tighter, _tighter_ \--

"Cru ... Cru ... _oh fuck, Cruella!_ " she keened, deep shudders riding the length of her body amidst the distant sound of splintering wood, hips bucking down into Cruella's relentless mouth that didn't skip a beat, wringing Ursula's climax of every delectable drop of pleasure it was worth, until with one last, breathless mewl the tension in her body thawed into mellow, sated complacency.

Cruella kissed her thighs again, unfolded her own long, sleek frame to kiss all the way up to Ursula's mouth.

"Darling?"

"Hmm?" Ursula mumbled, mind and body drifting slowly back to shore.

"I think you broke the bed."

She glanced down at the raw maple edges where the bedknobs used to be.

"Huh," she said, somewhat impressed with both herself and the woman who'd got her off hard enough to yield property damage. "I suppose we'll be getting a bill for that."

"Not if we dine and dash." Cruella snickered at her own joke.

Ursula rolled her eyes, but a wry smirk curled one corner of her mouth. Cruella kissed her there, then trailed her lips across Ursula's cheek to her ear.

"My turn, darling?" she asked, giving the lobe a nip as she ran a hand along the top of one tentacle.

Ursula laughed, soft and pruriently sinister.

"Your turn," she agreed, and both heard and felt Cruella shiver in response. "Kneel up."

This order, Cruella obeyed with much less dilly-dallying. Three of Ursula's tentacles spiraled rope-like about alabaster limbs, threading in figure-eights between Cruella's ankles and thighs, capturing her wrists together behind her back. The fourth one urged her gently forward, until she was bent double at the waist, balanced somewhere between her own weight and the powerful extremities that locked her lower body in place.

Ursula combed Cruella's hair back with her fingers and brushed a thumb along the edge of one prominent cheekbone. Cruella's face was already flushed, her lipstick a smeared pink memory of the red it had been, her mouth like that of a big cat's after feeding; but her eyes were still hungry, and they flickered over Ursula's face with an almost drugged rapacity that made the sea witch's heart race anew. No one else, merfolk or human or any other species, had ever looked at her so boldly with quite that same combination of arousal and awe -- not as the direful queen of all the ocean, and certainly not as an ordinary woman amongst teeming millions.

On their first night together, Ursula had almost found it offensive; but on their worst night, when she'd seen that it was unchanged, undiminished even when she herself had been ...

She blinked as if to clear her thoughts of a sudden, intrusive fog, although the puffs of the other witch's breath that ghosted across her face were quotidian and clear.

"Something the matter?" Cruella asked, and Ursula shook her head.

"Just enjoying the view."

Cruella gave a throaty chuckle. "Oh, darling, surely you can enjoy more than that?"

Ursula tilted her head consideringly. "Perhaps I can."

She licked her lips, dry mouth suddenly less so as she properly tasted her lover for the first time in decades, free tentacle gently probing soft flesh already so slippery with desire, little suckers bumping against Cruella's folds as they eased back and forth along her cunt, each one flexing in a kiss as it passed.

Cruella muttered a curse, rocking back as much as she was able. She closed her eyes and rolled her neck in time with the slow, sweet drags, snagging her bottom lip between her teeth in frustration when every wriggle to meet them only resulted in the firming of Ursula's hold on her limbs, and a taunting lessening of the pressure she preferred. She was on the verge of growling a dictate that Ursula, too, get on with business and save the silly buggers for the next go-around when one particularly swift, lengthy pass pulled an outright shout from her lips.

Head bowed, her hands clenched jerkily into fists behind her. Ursula cupped one hand around the humid nape of Cruella's neck and tipped her chin up with the other.

"Look at me," she said. "Look at me."

Cruella lifted her face, and Ursula felt the jump in her already rapid heartbeat through her skin when their eyes met, reaffirming what she'd too much come to question in the past thirty years.  
The tentacle plunged inside, and Cruella lurched forward with a sharp cry that Ursula caught in her mouth, burying her hands in dichromatic hair and kissing her through the shock of the sudden intrusion.

She pushed the appendage deeper, until the tip grazed the edge of Cruella's womb and folded over to double back on itself. Rare was the sex Cruella favored that didn't push her buttons with the aggression, Ursula had once remarked, of a hyperactive kid attacking an arcade game, but this was not to be rushed if she didn't want to end up broken as the bedknobs.

The sea witch worked methodically, wriggling the tip a little lower, pressing a little more tentacle in. She paced her movements to coincide with every other of Cruella's exhalations, mindful of her intermittent hisses and rasped profanities, of how the tension in her arms tightened and slacked, until at last she felt her start to relax all over, accustomed enough to the stretch that things could begin in earnest.

Cruella sucked a breath in through her teeth as the tentacle slid with anguine fluency inside her, seeming to crowd every available space and then some, filling her in a way that finned between the waters of fear and exhilaration, suckers softly nubbing along sensitive skin, tip curved to push with cadent insistency against that precious spot that never failed to leave her a shaking, panting mess, sometimes within seconds -- but Ursula was going much too slowly for that, holding her too still, pulling pleasure tight across the bridge between intimate jolts with a brutal patience that kept her chasing songs across long lines of radio static.

"Fuck, darling, you're killing me," Cruella whined, twisting her hips in frustration, the strain in her shoulders beginning to ache and burn.

"That's the general idea," Ursula replied, though in truth her deliberation was as much for her own benefit as her lover's. She found herself basking in sheer perceptual abundance, in feeling penned in on all sides by _Cruella_ \-- the flavor and feel of her, silky and feverish; the way her whole body seemed to flutter and buzz with wanton anticipation.

"Sadist," Cruella growled. "And after I--" A harsh breath as Ursula contracted her suckers. "--was so nice to you earlier ..."

"Mm," Ursula hummed in agreement. "You'd think the inventor of Don't Be a Hero would know better."

Cruella shuddered, baring her teeth in a grimace that she couldn't entirely stave off becoming a grin.

"Touché, darling, but please do pick up the pace?"

Ursula took Cruella's chin in hand and pushed their mouths together, licking in, sucking lightly at Cruella's bottom lip when she drew back again.

"... Only because you asked so pretty."

As vulnerable as Ursula was about the powerlessness of her voice, Cruella nearly came from that husky promise alone. Even more than the newly tailored tempo, that voice was the tug on the thread that unraveled her.

She buried her face in the crook of Ursula's neck as her orgasm gathered, piling up heavy and sultry as pelt, until it felt pinned into precarious place like a bridal gown for which an indrawn breath could prove fatal.

"Ursula," Cruella whispered, "Ursula ..."

And that was all it took -- her nerves caught fire and her spine bowed deep as the stitch was drawn up, skittering through her belly and shooting down her thighs in hard spasms backed by a strangled moan.

Ursula closed her eyes as Cruella guttered through her peak, one hand carding through the back of black and white hair, the other pressed to the crease between sharp shoulder blades until the tremors weakened and tapered off into stray, residual twinges.

At last the sea witch gently unwound and retracted her tentacles, and Cruella all but wilted against her, flushed cheek pillowed on Ursula's shoulder as her breathing gradually evened out and feeling once more needled its way into her arms.

"... I thought you'd be more out of practice than that," Cruella said hoarsely.

Ursula extended a leg and ran the sole of her foot down the back of the other witch's calf.

"So did I," she admitted.

"Like riding a bicycle, is it?"

Ursula laughed. "I've never ridden a bicycle."

"Nor I, come to think of it. I've ridden a motorbike, though."

"Really."

"Well, technically. I didn't _drive_ it."

"Not for lack of trying to steal the keys?"

Cruella shook her head. "Not my style, darling. The noise and the speed, yes, but it's murder on the hair, with or without a helmet."

"Ah, yes. One must keep up appearances."

"One must."

A few moments of companionable silence passed before Cruella rolled onto her back, rotating her shoulders and stretching luxuriously, then snorting in amusement when she caught sight of the pale, perfectly circular bruises stacked like bracelets from her wrists to her elbows.

"I knew it," she said. "You're going to turn me into a Dalmation again."

Ursula slid down in the bed until she was properly lying beside her, and took hold of one of Cruella's demonstrably raised arms, turning it this way and that, admiring her work.

"At least the only one out to skin you would be yourself. Might have enough for a wallet here. Maybe make a matching handbag from your legs."

Cruella glanced down her body and rolled her eyes.

"Could make a macintosh out of you, you know," she muttered, noticing that outside, the clouds had begun to make good on their promise of rain.

Ursula shook her head. "That would never work. I'm too good at getting you wet."

"Very funny."

"Seriously, I think my suckers were starting to prune."

Cruella scoffed. "That's not even possible. ... Is it?"

Ursula laced their fingers together. "We can test the theory after we get back, if you want."

"Back?"

"Did I fuck our date with the Dark One right out of your head?"

"Oh. _Him._ " Cruella frowned in distaste. "We could just leave him there, you know. I mean, we have our magic back, and we've at least a general idea of who we're supposed to be looking for, should we decide to join this ridiculous goose chase. The imp may be clever, but he's always proven to be more trouble than he's worth. And besides, we've heard this song and dance of his before; somehow I doubt performing it at gunpoint did much to change its tune, delightful though it was to watch him dance."

"We made a deal."

"And? At the very least, we ought to inconvenience _him_ for six weeks before making good on it. It's only fair."

Ursula stared at their locked hands, and rolled her lips.

"You're not wrong," she said, "but I'd rather be able to keep half an eye on him, whatever it is he's really up to. He may be the Dark One but he's also the Lazy One about clearing his browser history. He wasn't just catfishing his maid while he was staying with me."

Cruella quirked an eyebrow. "Oh? Checking the price of shoe lifts on Amazon, was he?"

"More like looking through the archives of the local newspapers of neighboring towns. Specifically those dating from May, 1983."

Beside her, Cruella went very still.

"And did he stumble upon anything ... interesting?" she asked.

"Not that I could tell. Nor did he say or ask me anything about it, which makes me like that he was looking even less."

Cruella chewed pensively at the inside of her cheek. "... As I said. More trouble than he's worth."

"No," Ursula said quietly. "No, this was worth it."

She meant, probably, their current circumstances as a whole, and at least four of its constituents more than any of the others.

Cruella kissed the back of her hand anyway.

"Of course it was, darling." She glanced at the clock on the bedside table, and sighed. "Clothes, then?"

"Clothes," Ursula agreed.

With considerably less exuberance than they'd occupied it, the two witches reluctantly decamped the bed.

* * *

  
It was late morning, or perhaps early afternoon, when Cruella woke, squinting against shaft of sunlight slanting through the part in the bedroom's kitschy gingham curtains to fall directly across her eyes. Grumbling a curse, she pulled her pillow out from underneath her head and whumped it over her face. The movement jostled a warm, heavy weight on her right shoulder, and she grimaced -- Richard must have been at the scotch again before bed; he was only ever foolish enough to crawl into hers anymore when bolstered by single-malt delusions of spousal entitlement. And good god, was she sore -- if that son of a bitch had added a Viagra to the mix and decided to play Rosemary's Baby, he would be _permanently_ losing the ability to achieve erection, no matter how skilled the surgeon assigned to reattach his--

But Richard was in prison.

Probably with his bail set at seven figures, with the amount of money he'd embezzled.

The events of the previous day broke through the dam of drowsiness still walling off part of her brain. Rumpel, _Ursula,_ the road trip, Regina, _the forest,_ and then waiting for that cantankerous old bitch to fork over a key to a chintzy little room that apparently substituted tissue paper for curtains ...

She felt Ursula sigh awake and shift against her, snuggling close, tightening the hold one arm and one leg and at least two tentacles had on Cruella's narrow frame.

"Morning, darling," Cruella croaked, voice still gruff from sleep and doubly muffled by the pillow.

Ursula's grip loosened, and she lifted her head. Light again assaulted the backs of Cruella's eyelids as her feather-stuffed shield was removed from her face.

She squinted one eye open. Ursula peered down at her with sleepy bemusement.

"Morning," the sea witch belatedly replied, and continued to stare.

"What?" Cruella asked. "What's that look? Are my eyebrows all over my face again?"

"No -- well, yes, but -- it's just that we haven't woken up together in ..." She sighed. "... a long time.

"Seven years," Cruella specified.

"You kept track?"

She could name the date exactly. "No. I just remember it wasn't long after the aquarium shenanigan. Alexis was five at the time, and she's nearly thirteen now, so ..."

Recognition and a sly smile spread across Ursula's features. "That reminds me ..."

"Oh, bugger," Cruella swore, inwardly kicking herself. "No it doesn't," she insisted.

"Oh, I think it does, _Grandma,_ " Ursula teased, running a tentacle down Cruella's left side, grinning when she reached the ticklish spot just at the dip of her waist and Cruella yelped, flinching sharply and halfway rolling over onto Ursula herself.

The tentacle slithered up her back, making her arch again, but rather pleasantly this time, with more of Ursula to arch into. It also held her there, as did Ursula's leg slung over her hip, and in the next moment all of the curses Cruella had been ready to reel off in response to the sea witch's utterance of the horrid G-word were traded for a more satisfying use of her tongue. The soreness in her body grew fainter, hushed by quickly renewing desire.

"You know," Ursula murmured, "I wouldn't mind getting used to it again."

The remark barely penetrated, focused as Cruella was on the wonderful abundance of heat and soft skin engulfing her senses, most especially the way Ursula had begun to gently grind against her thigh.

"Mmm, what's that, darling?" she sighed, kissing a trail along the other woman's jawline and throat, beginning with the beauty mark just to the right of her chin ...

"Waking up with you."

Cruella paused. _That_ she'd heard loud and clear. 

She kept her face buried in the crook of Ursula's neck, and noticed that Ursula, too, seemed to have entered a state of suspended animation as she waited for a response.

Could it really be that simple? After all these years of strained interaction, knifing each other in the emotional back, ignoring the wounds and belatedly kissing better the scars? Although, things _had_ largely improved over the past decade ... and the sex, well, that had certainly never suffered, no matter how rough the patches they'd gone through ... but, god, what kind of relationship took twenty years for its participants to even begin to get over themselves enough to function?

The only one Cruella had ever really wanted since she'd been in a position to choose for herself, for one.

The kind that had managed to last, in some form or another, longer than most marriages, for another. Certainly longer than any of Cruella's own had, largely superficial though they'd been.

And with Gold dangling their happy endings in front of them like twenty-four carats on a stick ...

Cruella was reasonably certain she could throw the supercilious little gremlin farther than she could trust him, but this much of his plan had managed to play out to their advantage, and if nothing else, it promised to be a great deal of fun. The impending revivification of Mal might have posed a bit of a problem, had he actually managed to find any evidence that the hatchling had survived (which was more than that sanctimonious little bandit and her arm candy husband had deigned to do -- they hadn't even asked after it, of all the rude, self-absorbed ... _ugh_ ), but last night, before finally sleeping, Cruella and Ursula had reconfirmed the decision they'd made, those many years ago, about what they would tell their draconian associate should they ever see her again -- namely, as little as they could get away with, while also lying through their teeth.

How accepting she would be of their explanation remained to be seen, but it was worth a try.

After last night, a lot of things felt suddenly worth a try.

Cruella pulled back to look Ursula in the face, into ordinarily indifferent eyes that shunted now between guarded and challenging -- between truth and double dog dare.

Fantastic to finally feel again like they were really open when they looked at her; fantastic, and perhaps, secretly, a fantastic relief, to know that it was still Cruella whom she chose to look at, now they were.

A smile edged with mischief kinked the corners of her lips.

"Well, darling, as you said ... we _are_ back together."


End file.
